Jim Butcher - Changes

I’ve heard it said that no plan survives first contact with the enemy.

It’s true.

The vampire let out an earsplitting screech, and all hell broke loose.

A lot of things happened very quickly.

Mouse rushed forward and caught the vampire by one calf just before it could vanish into the thick brush. He set his legs as the vampire struggled wildly, trying to scream again.

Martin brought his pistol up in a one- handed grip, six inches of sound suppressor attached to its muzzle. Without hesitating for an instant, Martin took a step to one side for a clear shot and fired on the move. The gun made a sound no louder than a man clearing his throat, and blood spattered from the vampire’s neck. Though it kept struggling, its screams suddenly ended, and it bounded and writhed wildly to maneuver Mouse between itself and Martin.

That stopped abruptly when Thomas’s falcata took the vampire’s head from its shoulders.

The half-naked man looked at us, and babbled something in Spanish. Susan answered him with a curt gesture and a harsh tone, and then the man blurted something, nodding emphatically, then turned to keep running into the darkness.

“Quiet,” I breathed, and everyone dropped silent while I stood quite still, Listening for all I was worth.

I have a knack, a skill that some people seem to be able to learn. I’m not sure if it’s something biological or magical, but it allows me to hear things I wouldn’t otherwise pick up, and I figured it was a good time for it.

For a long breath, there was nothing but the continued rumble of the drums.

Then a horn, something that sounded a bit like a conch, began to blow.

A chorus of vampire screams arose and it didn’t take any supergood hearing to know that they were headed our way.

“There. You see?” Sanya said, his tone gently reproving. “Frontal assault.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Murphy said, her tone more disgusted than afraid.

“He’s right,” I said, my voice hard. “Our only chance is to hit them hard.” We had only a moment, and my mind raced, trying to come up with a plan that resulted in something other than us drowning in a flood of vampires.

“Harry,” Susan said. “How are we going to do this?”

“I need Lea,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm and steady. “I need Molly.”

Molly made a squeaking noise.

I turned to Susan and said, “We do it in two waves.”

We moved directly toward the enemy, entering the ancient gallery full of columns, and the vampires came boiling out of the shadows to meet us. I don’t know how many of them there were. More than a hundred, less than a million. I stepped out in front of everyone and said, “Attack!”

Sanya’s battle roar was loudest. He leapt forward, drawing Esperacchius , and blazing light shone forth from the blade.

Murphy ran forward upon his right, letting out a scream of her own and holding the shining length of Fidelacchius in her hands. An aura of soft blue light had surrounded her. On Sanya’s left, Susan ran, Amoracchius held aloft and wreathed in white fire, and her scream was something primal and terrible. Thomas flanked Murphy. Martin ran next to Susan, and both of them charged forward with blade and pistol in hand.

I saw the front ranks of vampires hesitate as they saw the pure, terrible light of the three Swords coming toward them, but it wasn’t enough to stop the momentum of that horde. It swallowed all five valiant figures in a tidal wave of dark, flabby bodies, claws, fangs, and lashing tongues.

Suckers.

I still stood forward of everyone else, and the meeting of the two ranks of combatants brought the horde to a halt. A brief halt, true, something that lasted no more than a handful of seconds—but it was time enough for me to reach down to touch the slow, terrible power of the ley line flowing beneath my feet.

The temple atop the pyramid in the ruins was the center of the confluence, but ley lines, each one a vast, roaring current of magical energy, radiated out in all directions—and the one beneath us was an enormous current of raw earth magic. Earth magic wasn’t my forte, and I knew only a couple of applications well enough to use them in a fight.

But one of them was a doozy.

I reached out and touched the power of that ley line, desperately wishing I had my staff with me to assist with the effort. I could sense the earth magic in my mind, feel it flowing by with a power that vibrated up through the soles of the big, stompy, armor-plated boots my godmother had put on me. I took a deep breath, and then thrust my thoughts down into that power.

I was immediately overwhelmed with a rush of images and alien sensations, contacting a power so intense and coherent that it nearly had its own awareness. In a single moment, I saw the ponderous dance of continents clashing against one another to form mountains, felt the slow sleepiness of the earth, its dreaming shivers felt as disasters by the ephemeral things that lived upon its skin. I saw wealth and riches beyond petty mortal imagination, gold and silver flowing hot in rivers, precious gems by the millions being born and formed.

I fought to contain the images, to control them and channel them, focusing all of those sensations into a well I could see only in my imagination, a point deep below the gallery of crumbling old stone that rested next to the pitifully temporary mortal structure on the surface.

Once I had the raw magic I needed, I was able to pull my mind clear of the ley line, and I was suddenly holding a whirlwind of molten stone in my head, seething against the containment of my will until it felt like my skull would burst outward from the pressure, and realized as I did that the use to which I was putting this pure, raw energy was almost childish in its simplicity. I was a frail wisp of mortality beside that energy, which could, quite literally, have moved mountains, leveled cities, shifted the course of rivers, and stirred oceans in their beds.

I set that well of energy to spinning, and directed its power as it spiraled up, a tornado of magic that reached out to embrace simple gravity. With the enormous energy of the ley line, I focused the pull of the earth for miles around into a circle a couple of hundred yards across and spoke a single word as I unleashed the torrent of energy, bound only, firmly if imperfectly, by my will. The spell, start to finish, had taken me a good sixty seconds to put together, and tapping into the ley line had been the last part of the process—far too long and far too destructive to use in any of the faster and more furious fights that I’d found myself in over the years.

Perfect for tonight.

For a quarter of a second, gravity vanished from Chichén Itzá, and the land for miles all around it, jerking everything that wasn’t fastened down, myself included, several inches into the air. For that time, all of that force was focused and concentrated into a circle perhaps two hundred yards across that embraced the entire gallery and every vampire inside it. There, the enormous power of that much focused gravity, nearly three hundred times normal, slammed everyone and everything straight down, as if crushed by a single, gigantic, invisible anvil.

The stone columns handled it better than I thought they would. Maybe half of them suddenly cracked, shattered, and fell into rubble, but the rest bore up under the strain as they had for centuries.

The assault force of the Red Court wasn’t nearly so resilient.

I could hear the bones breaking from where I stood, each snapping with hideously sharp pops and cracks. Down crashed the wave of vampires in a mass of shattered bones. Many of them were crushed beneath the falling stones of the weaker columns—each flabby black body smashed beneath a weight of scores of tons of stone, even if hit by only one piece from a single block.